Search

Evidence on newborns’ discrimination of emotional facial expressions is scarce, and the question of what is the nature of the visual information that newborns rely on to perform such discrimination remains open. Here, we manipulated the spatial frequency (SF) content of the stimuli by selectively removing low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequency bands using newborn-appropriate cutoffs to investigate what information newborns use when preferring and discriminating between dynamic displays showing happy and fearful expressions unfolding over time. Using a preferential looking paradigm, in Study 1 (N = 63, 59% females, 92% White), we showed that newborns looked longer to happy over fearful expressions in unfiltered (broad spatial frequency) and high-pass (high spatial frequency.0.6 cycles per degree [cpd]) faces but not in low-pass (LSF, 0.5 cpd) faces. In Study 2 (N = 22, 59% females, 91% White), newborns tested in a visual habituation paradigm showed successful discrimination of the two LSF emotions. Results show that newborns can discriminate between dynamic images of happy and fearful facial expressions containing either extreme low SF (,0.5 cpd) information or higher SF (.0.6 cpd) bandwidth. Their preference for the happy expression was present for intact and high-pass filtered faces but not for low-pass faces. This SF effect is tentatively driven by an enhancement of attentional response to the LSF fearful face, whereas the response to the happy face is unaffected by the SF manipulation.

Il ritmo è una componente intrinseca del comportamento umano e pervade il nostro ambiente fin dalla vita intrauterina. Questa tesi di dottorato ha esplorato come il nostro cervello sfrutta il ritmo per ottimizzare le interazioni con l'ambiente nelle prime fasi della vita, testando l'effetto del ritmo su due funzioni motorie e cognitive dei neonati: la Suzione Non-Nutritiva (SNN), un comportamento ritmico presente già in utero, e l'attenzione visiva, che negli adulti sappiamo esse modulata dal ritmo. Nove studi hanno affrontato 3 domande principali: 1) Il ritmo modula la SNN alla nascita e l'orientamento dell'attenzione visuospaziale alla nascita e a 2 mesi? 2) L'arricchimento ritmico prenatale modula gli effetti del ritmo sulla SNN e sull'attenzione visuospaziale alla nascita e a 2 mesi? 3) Il ritmo influenza la percezione visiva negli adulti e nei neonati? Lo Studio 1 ha indagato l’effetto della stimolazione acustica ritmica vs. non-ritmica sulla SNN. I risultati mostrano che la frequenza della SNN diminuisce durante la presentazione del suono non-ritmico, che ha quindi un effetto inibitorio sulla SNN dei neonati. Lo Studio 2 ha esplorato l'effetto della stimolazione ritmica prenatale sulla SNN e sulla capacità di adattare il proprio ritmo di suzione a stimolazioni ritmiche esterne. I risultati suggeriscono che 1) l'esposizione arricchita al ritmo aumenta la frequenza della SNN dopo la nascita e 2) la risposta inibitoria ai suoni non-ritmici varia in funzione della quantità di stimolazione ritmica prenatale ricevuta. Gli Studi 3a-3b hanno indagato l'effetto del ritmo sull'attenzione visuospaziale, testando la capacità di disancorare l'attenzione visiva da uno stimolo centrale (S1) ritmico vs. non-ritmico alla nascita e a 2 mesi. I risultati mostrano che a 2 mesi, ma non alla nascita, i neonati sono più lenti a disancorare l'attenzione visiva da S1 non-ritmico rispetto a quando S1 è ritmico o statico. Lo Studio 3c è stato condotto per esaminare l'eventuale i, Rhythm, the recurrence of temporal structures over time, is an inherent part of human behaviour and pervades our environment since intrauterine life. This doctoral thesis explored how our brain harnesses rhythmic cues to optimise interactions with the environment in the earliest stages of life by testing the effect of rhythm on two infants’ motor and cognitive functions: Non-Nutritive Sucking (NNS), which is an endogenous rhythmic behaviour available in utero, and visual attention, which in adults is known to be modulated by rhythmic cues. Nine studies addressed 3 main questions: 1) Does rhythmic stimulation modulate NNS at birth and the orienting of visuospatial attention at birth and 2 months? 2) Does prenatal rhythmic enrichment modulate the effects of rhythm on NNS and visuospatial attention at birth and 2 months? 3) Does rhythm affect visual perception in adults and infants? Study 1 investigated the impact of rhythmic vs. non-rhythmic sounds on NNS. Results showed that NNS rate was lower when the non-rhythmic sound was presented contingent upon sucking than when the rhythmic sound or no sound was presented. These findings suggest that non-rhythmic acoustic stimulation produces an inhibitory effect on newborns’ NNS behaviour. Study 2 explored the effect of prenatal rhythmic stimulation on NNS and the ability to modulate the NNS sucking rhythm in response to external rhythmic stimulation. Results showed that 1) the enriched exposure to rhythm enhanced the NNS rate and pressure after birth, and 2) the inhibitory response to non-rhythmic sounds varied as a function of the amount of prenatal rhythmic stimulation. Studies 3a-3b investigated the effect of rhythm on visuospatial attention, testing the ability to disengage visual attention from a rhythmic vs. non-rhythmic central stimulus (S1) at birth and 2 months. Results showed that at 2 months, but not at birth, infants were slower in disengaging visual attention from a non-rhythmic S1 than when S1 was rhythmic or s

By 27-week gestation the brain undergoes extensive changes driven by external input, suggesting that learning occurs even before birth. Much of the sensory input that reaches the foetus has a rhythmic structure, and literature suggests that intrauterine rhythmic experience may contribute to the emergence of complex skills during postnatal life. Adult studies show that rhythm entrains attention enhancing information processing. Here, we hypothesised that exposure to rhythmic stimulation may boost attention from the earliest stages of neurodevelopment. To this end, we tested the short- and long-term effects of enriched multisensory rhythmic stimulation provided across the last trimester of gestation on visual spatial attention at birth and 2 months postpartum. Starting from 29-week gestation two groups of mothers follows a rhythmic or non-rhythmic stimulation protocol, and infants’ visuo-spatial attention skills are tested at birth and 2 months using a disengagement task in which accuracy and latency of orienting toward a peripheral target are measured as a function of the rhythmic vs random temporal structure of a central cue. Data collection is in progress: we expect rhythm to constrain the efficiency of attentional orienting differently for infants in the two groups.

Prolonged periods of restrictions on people's freedom of movement during the first massive wave of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that most people engaged in all their daily activities at home. This suggested the need for the spatial features of the home and its occupants' perception of them to be investigated in terms of people's wellbeing. The present study was conducted on a large sample (N = 1354) drawn from different Italian regions. It examined the relationship between the “objective” and “subjective” dimensions of the home, measured in terms of objective home crowding and satisfaction with the space at home, in relation to perceived stress and the perceived risk of COVID-19 infection during the lockdown. The results showed that perceived stress is influenced by objective home crowding through the mediation of satisfaction with the space at home. These associations were more pronounced in younger generations. The negative association between satisfaction with the space at home and perceived stress was higher, the lower the perceived COVID-19 risk.

Deaf individuals may report difficulties in social interactions. However, whether these difficulties depend on deafness affecting social brain circuits is controversial. Here, we report the first meta-analysis comparing brain activations of hearing and (prelingually) deaf individuals during social perception. Our findings showed that deafness does not impact on the functional mechanisms supporting social perception. Indeed, both deaf and hearing control participants recruited regions of the action observation network during performance of different social tasks employing visual stimuli, and including biological motion perception, face identification, action observation, viewing, identification and memory for signs and lip reading. Moreover, we found increased recruitment of the superior-middle temporal cortex in deaf individuals compared with hearing participants, suggesting a preserved and augmented function during social communication based on signs and lip movements. Overall, our meta-analysis suggests that social difficulties experienced by deaf individuals are unlikely to be associated with brain alterations but may rather depend on non-supportive environments.

Despite the ubiquitous interdependence between one's own decisions and others' welfare, and the controversial evidence on the behavioral effect of choosing for others, the neural bases of making decisions for another versus oneself remain unexplored. We investigated whether loss aversion (LA; the tendency to avoid losses over approaching equivalent gains) is modulated by (i) choosing for oneself, other individuals, or both; (ii) knowing or not knowing the other recipients; or (iii) an interaction between these factors. We used fMRI to assess the brain activations associated with choosing whether to accept or reject mixed gambles, either for oneself, for another player, or both, in 2 groups of 28 participants who had or had not briefly interacted with the other players before scanning. Participants displayed higher LA for choices involving their payoff compared with those affecting only the payoff of other, known, players. This "social" modulation of decision-making was found to engage the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and its inhibitory connectivity to the middle cingulate cortex. This pattern might underpin decision-making for known others via self-other distinction processes associated with dorsomedial prefrontal areas, with this in turn promoting the inhibition of socially oriented responses through the downregulation of the midcingulate node of the empathy network.

Interpersonal space (IPS) is the area surrounding our own bodies in which we interact comfortably with other individuals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping larger IPS than usual, along with wearing a face mask, is one of the most effective measures to slow down the COVID-19 outbreak. Here, we explore the contribution of actual and perceived risk of contagion and anxiety levels in regulating our preferred social distance from other people during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. In this study, 1293 individuals from six Italian regions with different levels of actual risk of infection participated in an online survey assessing their perceived risk to be infected, level of anxiety and IPS. Two tasks were adopted as measures of interpersonal distance: the Interpersonal Visual Analogue Scale and a questionnaire evaluating interpersonal distance with and without face mask. The results showed that the IPS regulation was affected by how people subjectively perceived COVID-19 risk and the related level of anxiety, not by actual objective risk. This clarifies that the role of threat in prompting avoidant behaviors expressed in increased IPS does not merely reflect environmental events but rather how they are subjectively experienced and represented.

Social cognition skills are typically acquired on the basis of visual information (e.g., the observation of gaze, facial expressions, gestures). In light of this, a critical issue is whether and how the lack of visual experience affects neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social skills. This issue has been largely neglected in the literature on blindness, despite difficulties in social interactions may be particular salient in the life of blind individuals (especially children). Here we provide a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies reporting brain activations associated to the representation of self and others' in early blind individuals and in sighted controls. Our results indicate that early blindness does not critically impact on the development of the “social brain,” with social tasks performed on the basis of auditory or tactile information driving consistent activations in nodes of the action observation network, typically active during actual observation of others in sighted individuals. Interestingly though, activations along this network appeared more left-lateralized in the blind than in sighted participants. These results may have important implications for the development of specific training programs to improve social skills in blind children and young adults.

Research has shown that adults are better at processing faces of the most represented ethnic group in their social environment compared to faces from other ethnicities, and that they rely more on holistic/configural information for identity discrimination in own-race than other-race faces. Here, we applied a spatial filtering approach to the investigation of trustworthiness perception to explore whether the information on which trustworthiness judgments are based differs according to face race. European participants (N = 165) performed an online-delivered pairwise preference task in which they were asked to select the face they would trust more within pairs randomly selected from validated White and Asian broad spectrum, low-pass filter and high-pass filter trustworthiness continua. Results confirmed earlier demonstrations that trustworthiness perception generalizes across face ethnicity, but discrimination of trustworthiness intensity relied more heavily on the LSF content of the images for own-race faces compared to other-race faces. Results are discussed in light of previous work on emotion discrimination and the hypothesis of overlapping perceptual mechanisms subtending social perception of faces.

Patients with Parkinson disease (PD) may show impairments in the social perception. Whether these deficits have been consistently reported, it remains to be clarified which brain alterations subtend them. To this aim, we conducted a neuroimaging meta-analysis to compare the brain activity during social perception in patients with PD versus healthy controls. Our results show that PD patients exhibit a significantly decreased response in the basal ganglia (putamen and pallidum) and a trend toward decreased activity in the mirror system, particularly in the left parietal cortex (inferior parietal lobule and intraparietal sulcus). This reduced activation may be tied to a disruption of cognitive resonance mechanisms and may thus constitute the basis of impaired others’ representations underlying action and emotion perception. We also found increased activation in the posterior cerebellum in PD, although only in a within-group analysis and not in comparison with healthy controls. This cerebellar activation may reflect compensatory mechanisms, an aspect that deserves further investigation. We discuss the clinical implications of our findings for the development of novel social skill training programs for PD patients.

Previous inconsistencies on the effects of implicitly processing positively - vs. negatively - connotated emotional words might reflect the influence of uncontrolled psycholinguistic dimensions, and/or social facets inherent in putative "emotional" stimuli. Based on the relevance of social features in semantic cognition, we developed a socio-emotional Stroop task to assess the influence of social vs. individual (non-social) emotional content, besides negative vs. positive valence, on implicit word processing. The effect of these variables was evaluated in terms of performance and RTs, alongside associated brain activity/connectivity. We matched conditions for several psycholinguistic variables, and assessed a modulation of brain activity/connectivity by trial-wise RT, to characterize the maximum of condition- and subject-specific variability. RTs were tracked by insular and anterior cingulate activations likely reflecting implicit attention to stimuli, interfering with task-performance based on condition-specific processing of their subjective salience. Slower performance for negative than neutral/positive words was tracked by left-hemispheric structures processing negative stimuli and emotions, such as fronto-insular cortex, while the lack of specific activations for positively-connotated words supported their marginal facilitatory effect. The speeding/slowing effects of processing positive/negative individual emotional stimuli were enhanced by social words, reflecting in specific activations of the right anterior temporal and orbitofrontal cortex, respectively. RTs to social positive and negative words modulated connectivity from these regions to fronto-striatal and sensorimotor structures, respectively, likely promoting approach vs. avoidance dispositions shaping their facilitatory vs. inhibitory effect. These results might help assessing the neural correlates of impaired social cognition and emotional regulation, and the effects of rehabilitative interventions.

While the discussion on the foundations of social understanding mainly revolves around the notions of empathy, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing, their degree of overlap versus specificity is still unclear. We took a meta-analytic approach to unveil the neural bases of cognitive mentalizing, affective mentalizing, and empathy, both in healthy individuals and pathological conditions characterized by social deficits such as schizophrenia and autism. We observed partially overlapping networks for cognitive and affective mentalizing in the medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, and lateral temporal cortex, while empathy mainly engaged fronto-insular, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex. Adjacent process-specific regions in the posterior lateral temporal, ventrolateral, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex might underpin a transition from abstract representations of cognitive mental states detached from sensory facets to emotionally-charged representations of affective mental states. Altered mentalizing-related activity involved distinct sectors of the posterior lateral temporal cortex in schizophrenia and autism, while only the latter group displayed abnormal empathy related activity in the amygdala. These data might inform the design of rehabilitative treatments for social cognitive deficits.

We have previously shown that activity and connectivity within and between the action observation and mentalizing brain systems reflect the degree of positive dimensions expressed by social interactions such as cooperativity and affectivity, respectively. Here we aim to extend this evidence by investigating the neural bases of processing negative dimensions of observed interactions, such as competition and affective conflict, possibly representing a benchmark for different pathological conditions. In this fMRI study 34 healthy participants were shown pictures depicting interactions characterized by two crossed dimensions, i.e. positively- vs. negatively- connotated social intentions mainly expressed in terms of motor acts vs. mental states, i.e. cooperative, competitive, affective and conflicting interactions. We confirmed the involvement of the action observation and mentalizing networks in processing intentions mainly expressed through motor acts (cooperative/competitive) vs. mental states (affective/conflicting), respectively. Results highlighted the selective role of the left pSTS/TPJ in decoding social interactions, even when compared with parallel actions by non-interacting individuals. Its right-hemispheric homologue displayed stronger responses to negative than positive social intentions, regardless of their motor/mental status, and decreased connectivity with the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) when processing negative interactions. The resulting mPFC downregulation by negative social scenes might reflect an adaptive response to socio-affective threats, via decreased mentalizing when facing negative social stimuli. This evidence on the brain mechanisms underlying the decoding of real complex interactions represents a baseline for assessing both the neural correlates of impaired social cognition, and the effects of rehabilitative treatments, in neuro-psychiatric diseases or borderline conditions such as loneliness.

Decoding the meaning of others’ actions, a crucial step for social cognition, involves different neural mechanisms. While the “mirror” and “mentalizing” systems have been associated with, respectively, the processing of biological actions versus more abstract information, their respective contribution to intention understanding is debated. Processing social interactions seems to recruit both neural systems, with a different weight depending on cues emphasizing either shared action goals or shared mental states. We have previously shown that observing cooperative and affective social interactions elicits stronger activity in key nodes of, respectively, the mirror (left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), superior parietal cortex (SPL), and ventral/dorsal premotor cortex (vPMC/dPMC)) and mentalizing (ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)) systems. To unveil their causal organization, we investigated the effective connectivity underlying the observation of human social interactions expressing increasing cooperativity (involving left pSTS, SPL, and vPMC) versus affectivity (vmPFC) via dynamic causal modeling in 36 healthy human subjects. We found strong evidence for a model including the pSTS and vPMC as input nodes for the observed interactions. The extrinsic connectivity of this model undergoes oppositely valenced modulations, with cooperativity promoting positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and both SPL (forward) and vPMC (mainly backward), and affectivity promoting reciprocal positive modulations of connectivity between pSTS and vmPFC (mainly backward). Alongside fMRI data, such divergent effective connectivity suggests that different dimensions underlying the processing of social interactions recruit distinct, although strongly interconnected, neural pathways associated with, respectively, the bottom–up visuomotor processing of motor intentions, and the top–down attribution of affective/mental states.